This essay was published in the 2018 issue of the Bear River Review.
I stand at the edge of Kathmandu’s Thabahi Road as if before the banks of a tumultuous river, while I evaluate how safe it is to cross; the street, thick with pedestrians, dirt, cars, and men barreling by on tiny motorcycles, dodging and weaving through potential collisions. My western eye, so accustomed to traffic laws, can’t discern any boundary between vehicle and pedestrian. I dip my flip-flopped foot into the street, hoping the city won’t whirl me away, or slam me into a car.
It’s March–the start of trekking season, when the beating sun clears the trails of frost, when vaccinated tourists begin traversing the chain of tea houses across remote villages high in the Annapurna region of the Himilaya, which bulges out in western Nepal 86 miles west of Lukla, launch point of Mt. Everest expeditions. The year is 2014. Dust-clad automobiles clog the street. A form of industrial revolution–and just plan revolution–has deigned to manifest here, as if one hand skims under the sheet of time from late-1700s Europe to the U.S. and now props up Nepal. Until 1990, Nepal was a kingdom, some of whose citizens today worship a living goddess, the Kumari, a premenstrual girl dressed in red, eyes thick with black liner, who dwells in a palace carved in the heart of the city and whose profile you can sometimes catch in a window overlooking the square. To worship the goddess in the young girl is to worship divine consciousness in all of creation, for some of the country’s Buddhists and Hindus, whose religions not only coexist but commingle in ways only possible here, where India and Tibet meet, and where the Buddha was born 623 years B.C.E.
Tourists from Australia, Germany, Canada, and the U.S. have gathered in these hallowed grounds at the Thamel Eco Lodge to trek from Kathmandu to the Annapurna Circuit, a route Backpacker Magazine says “has been hailed as the holy grail of trekking since it was first opened to foreigners in the early 1980s.” Into this group my lifelong friend and travel buddy, Ashley, and I assimilated, for safety in numbers as well as a good deal on Groupon.
With street smarts, a guide and a tourist bus you can dip in and out of lawless Kathmandu unscathed by violence or theft, but you feel a steady undercurrent of threat and uncertainty, and you won’t leave clean. The dirt of the city clings to any and all bare skin the moment you step outside and, even when you wash it off in your shower that has no curtain, that is in fact just a faucet sticking out of the wall next to the toilet, its substance seeps through the skin straight to the bloodstream. The soul of the city is as raw as it is ancient–neolithic tools found in Kathmandu Valley reveal that people have lived here for 9,000+ years. When the soul of the city melds into yours, you can’t tell the difference, and you enter the flow of time.
